Koufax scouting report
I thought I'd use the occasion of the Koufax nominations to look around at some of the blogs listed under "most deserving of wider recognition." Here are some of the posts I noticed:

At The Galloping Beaver, Canadian blogger Dave observes American movement conservatives trying to distance themselves from Bush, and writes:

You can't blame anything on George W. Bush. You are George W. Bush. The lies, the criminality, the deception and unbelievable disaster that is US foreign policy all belong to you. You did it. Bush simply signed the bills and executive orders you placed before him.

Tom Hilton, of the Bay Area group blog If I ran the Zoo has a great headline -- "Foxes: "We Weren't Consulted on Henhouse Rules" -- and writes:

I had to laugh out loud--and, y'know, cry just a little--at this headline in yesterday's Chronicle:

Lobbyists press Congress to ease tough ethics rules
They're angry they had no input in law about to take effect

Yes, that's right: the people whose job is to distort and corrupt the political process are put out because they weren't consulted on the bill meant to curb their excesses.

PS, 6/11: Hilton also has a beautiful Sierra Nevada photo series at the blog, and often posts about backpacking there.

Mock Paper Scissors has a scary photoshop image to go with the scary rumor that Second Lady Lynne Cheney might be proposed as a replacement for Wyoming Senator Craig Thomas, who died earlier this week. I hope this is just a strategic trial balloon, not an imminent choice -- because if there's even a one percent chance of this, we'll just have to invade Wyoming. (Late development, via Talking Points Memo, is that Vikram Amar, a UCSF constitutional scholar, is suggesting that a close reading of the 17th Amendment makes the Wyoming law unconstitutional; it impermissibly constrains the governor both to have to name a replacement, and have to name one from a restricted list of choices, rather than simply empowering him to do so.)

pass the roti on the left hand side is a South Asian/diaspora-focused group blog; the latest post there, "Musharraf Forces Journalists to Keep Chhuup" by Desi Italiana, notes how Musharraf is cracking down on journalism in Pakistan, and the mealy-mouthed U.S. response to that -- only a month after the US Embassy in Islamabad celebrated a bromide-filled "World Journalism Day", e.g., "Free and independent information is the number one means to clearly portray U.S. interests in South Asia ’s economic growth and democratic reform." Italiana concludes:

"In US parlance, "free" speech really means "speech that paints the US under uncritical and positive light.""

By blocking broadcasts by 3 TV networks critical of his sacking of a Supreme Court judge, Musharraf is doing much the same kind of thing Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez is deservedly being criticized for -- with none of the same vocal outrage from the Bush administration. Translation notes: roti="that good flat bread type stuff you get with Indian/South Asian food," I think; chhuup="the hell quiet," I guess.

LesbianDad has one of the nicer blurbs I've run across: "LesbianDad is written by a non-biological lesbo parent who answers to the name Baba and works toward a world in which amor does indeed vincit omnia." I'm for that. Go amor! Vincit omnia! Her latest post -- "AfterBath" -- gets a "been there" from this StraightDad:

Note to self: when we’re knee-deep in the worst of it — when she’s got the shampoo all in her hair, and she has moved from stubbornly refusing to let it get washed out, to desperately begging through tears that we not wash it out, and we know there’s little else we can do at this point but impose our will against hers, and being parents in this moment feels way too much like being cops (and sadistic ones at that) — in these moments, we need to remember that:

a) less than ten minutes later, reading a book and drinking her milk, she will have forgiven us and forgotten, bless her, and
b) we are damned lucky that this is the worst of it, if that’s the worst it is getting these days.

Skeptical Brotha is "a black, 30 something, political junkie residing somewhere in the Carolina’s"; in a post on Wednesday, he wrote:

I know we go back and forth around here about Obama, and I know that a lot of folks aren't haters, but skeptics, but this, to me, is sort of serious. The ONLY Black candidate FINALLY presents an 'Urban Agenda', and it's not even reported?

He's right. Obama's fine speech was at best ignored, and at worst completely misrepresented as a warning about race riots; because of Skeptical Brotha, I've finally read it now, and I think it deserves to be remembered for Obama's detailed policy prescriptions for fighting poverty, helping minority businesses, and building prison-to-work programs, among others. It also deserves to be remembered for how Obama motivates his audience and himself, with his refrain of "Our God is greater than that," and particularly with his powerful story and metaphor of a baby wounded in the womb during the LA riots 15 years ago: "It's time to take the bullet out."

ArchCrone is from my old home town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee; she's a co-blogger at "The Crone Speaks" (after ending the solo blog "Thoughts of an Average Woman"). In her latest post, she writes about the three year sentence for Mary Winkler, a Tennessee woman convicted of voluntary manslaughter for shooting her abusive, rapist husband. With parts of that sentence already served, and others to be spent in a mental health facility, Ms. Winkler may not spend any more time in jail, which I think is a good thing. Apparently, she can count herself "fortunate," judging by statistics ArchCrone assembles:

The statistics of prison time of men that kill their spouses and women that kill their spouses is astoundingly unjust.

The average prison sentence for men who kill their intimate partners is 2 to 6 years. Women who kill their partners are sentenced, on average, to 15 years.

The reasons are far different as well.

In 1993 an Ohio-based research team studying the motivations for murder in intimate relationships found that 82 percent of men in custody who killed female partners or wives did so because they were motivated by "possessiveness," whereas 83 percent of women in custody described their motivation for murder as "self-defense."

Good for the jury for not convicting her of murder (the charge prosecutors sought); good for the judge for not seeking more retribution. Maybe some abusive husband will take heed. And maybe more people will help women in abusive relationships, and not assume they don't need the help. This guy was a preacher.

-----

Well, I've done my part. Before I once again succumb to A-list lethargy, I challenge more bloggers allegedly "worthy of greater recognition" to look around and do some of that recognition with "Koufax Scouting Reports" of their own. See you later! Eschaton, Huffington, Daily Kos, Eschaton, open thread, rock on.... zzzzzzz.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:30:00 AM -- |  

 
National Popular Vote vs. fixing the electoral college
In an aside to an earlier post, I mentioned that I'm skeptical about the so-called "National Popular Vote" (NPV) plan. Even if my skepticism concerned anyone, NPV supporters in Maryland can breathe easy, of course, because our state has passed a law making Maryland the first state to pledge to cast its electoral votes for the popular vote winner, if other states comprising an electoral majority follow suit. If enough other states follow suit, NPV might be an elegant veto of today's electoral college system, without all the fuss of a constitutional amendment.

But maybe this problem and its remedy deserve a fuss. I think the "National Popular Vote" is based on a misdiagnosis of the problem with our electoral college, and actually replaces one antidemocratic effect of that system with another, worse one. The real problem isn't that the outcomes of 51 State races overrides the popular vote; in my opinion, the problem is simply that the apportionment of electors to the states makes election outcomes in small states -- and, as it happens, rural Western ones -- far too important, at the expense of those in other states.

By contrast, the "51 race," indirect election feature of the electoral college system is actually a good thing, in my opinion. Why? There are a number of reasons, I think, and I'll try to develop them further another time. But fundamentally, they all boil down to this: because it's the 51 states that actually administer elections -- not the federal government. Under the NPV system, Maryland would routinely risk forfeiting its electoral votes to a candidate its voters didn't favor -- a candidate who necessarily only won elsewhere, in elections that were by definition completely unaccountable to Maryland voters.

The way the electoral college is composed, however, is a bad thing. Why? The formula for allocating electoral votes to each state is to add the number of Congressional representatives from each state -- proportional to the number of that state's population, but with a minimum of one -- to the number of senators from each state. The result is to guarantee states with paltry populations like Wyoming and Alaska a minimum of three electoral votes -- and a vastly disproportionate influence on the outcome of presidential elections.

The 2000 presidential election is Exhibit A for most critiques of the electoral college. But as the first image on the right shows (and the linked spreadsheet documents in detail), the effect of of just abolishing each state's "Senate-based" electors would have resulted in a 225-211 Gore victory, much more closely matching the popular vote outcome -- and without requiring any state's voters to accept misrepresentation of their collective decision based on election outcomes administered elsewhere.

Adjusting the electors to a completely population-proportional formula (i.e., having the least populous state wield one electoral vote, and others proportionally more) would have had similar results.

It's not the electoral college per se that needs to bother us, it's how its votes are allocated.

Of course, both the current system or one modified by abolishing Senate-based electors leaves many "losing" voters misrepresented. But
(a) that's a state of affairs they accept in all kinds of ways as it is, for example in voting for governor;
(b) given that one election's losing voter may be the next one's winning voter, it's rational to accept a winner-take-all system to maximize your winning vote's impact; and
(c) there's nothing preventing a given state from choosing to emulate Maine or Nebraska and open the door to split electoral votes.*

One may argue that it's disingenuous of me to judge my electoral college scenarios by whether Gore would have won the 2000 election, rather than simply preferring the popular vote result. My goal, however, was mainly to demonstrate that the 2000 outcome could have been avoided with a constitutionally more conservative remedy than NPV.

But I'm willing to take it a step further and say that if either electoral college reform I propose were undertaken, I would actually prefer the electoral winner to the popular vote winner when they were different. Why? For the very reasons the electoral college system was designed in the first place.

Think about it. You've ironed out the disproportionalities, and now you have an election where Candidate A wins 50 out of the country's 51 states and jurisdictions by slim but consistent margins, say 51-49%. But Candidate B is a favorite in one large state, say... Texas. Or Florida. Or wherever. She wins by 60-40% there, and hence wins the popular vote. But just look at the map; personally, I would like Candidate A's claim to the whole country's leadership better than I like Candidate B's -- and so would quite a number of other voters, in quite a number of other states. Supreme Court, here we come.

Reasonable people can differ about this kind of thing, of course -- but they did, they wrote a Constitution about it, and they basically found for the electoral college method, not the popular vote one. I suggest that if we're going to change a fundamental process of our democracy, and in so doing undermine the federalism that's one of our republic's most important features, let's do it right: by Constitutional amendment, not by a state compact.



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* Maine and Nebraska election law calls for splitting their electoral votes, casting the Senate-based votes on the basis of the statewide winner and the remaining votes on the basis of each congressional district's winner. In practice, though, both states' election results have led to "no-split" electoral votes in past elections.

EDIT, 6/8: "One may argue" paragraph rewritten for clarity; the original text will be saved in comments in case anyone cares. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:18:00 AM -- |  

 
2006 Koufax nominations
The 2006 Koufax "Most Deserving of Wider Recognition" nominations have been posted. Thanks to some kind, pitying soul, a complete breakdown in quality control, and a deeply troubling failure in border security procedures, they include this blog -- thank you! In order to get everybody's Google rating or whatever up a little higher, here's the list in full:

abyss2hope: A rape survivor's zigzag journey into the open, Aetiology, Ali Eteraz, Alterdestiny, And Doctor Biobrain's Response Is..., Angry Brown Butch, Anonymous Liberal, Antagony & Ecstasy, The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum, appletree, Archy, art crit, at the end of the boom, Axis of Evel Knievel, BagNewsNotes, Bark Bark Woof Woof, Bats Left, Throws Right, Being Amber Rhea, Blah3.com, A Blog Around the Clock, Blog of the Moderate Left, Blue Gal*, The Blue Republic, BlueNC, Bouphonia, The Brad Blog*, Brains and Eggs, A Brown Eyed Handsome Man, Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty , Confined Space (quit, unfortunately), Conservative Truths, Digital Doorway, Dos Centavos, Down With Tyranny!, d r i f t g l a s s, ebogjohnson.com, Echidne* (hey, she won last year, no fair), elle, phd, eminism.org, Engulfed Cathedral, European Tribune, Existential Ramble, eye of the storm, F-Words, Fact-esque, The Fat Lady Sings, Feline Formal Shorts, Fetch Me My Axe (best blog name), The Fifth Estate, First Draft, thefreeslave, The Galloping Beaver, Gender 3.0, Good Times and Bad Times in Lost America, The Gun Toting Liberal, HAH!, Having Read the Fine Print (a.k.a. Black Amazon), The Heretik*, How This Old Brit Sees It ..., Huck and Jim, Ice Station Tango, If I Ran the Zoo (highlights here), Ilyka Damen, I'm Not a Feminist, But, INTL News, Jane Awake, Jay Sennett, Karena, konagod, Larvatus Prodeo, Lawyers, Gun$ and Money*, The Left End of the Dial, LEFT IN EAST DAKOTA (the old all caps trick, eh), LesbianDad, Life From The Trenches....Literally, Life, Law, Gender, Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted), Lydia Cornell, Marisacat, McBlogger, Media Needle, Mercury Rising, Mock, Paper, Scissors, Musical Perceptions, Musings, Nation-Building, Newsrack Blog (ta da!), No More Mr. Nice Guy!, No Right Turn, Norwegianity*, The Oil Drum, Orcinus*, Packaging Girlhood, pass the roti on the left hand side, Persephone's Box , phronesisiacal, The Primary Contradiction, Power and Politics, Progressive Gold, Progressive Historians, Prometheus 6, Puisi-poesy, The Quaker Agitator, Race Changers - working towards an anti-racist future, one week at a time, Rachel's Tavern, Racialicious, Rants From The Rookery, The Reaction, Real Climate, Reclusive Leftist, Replace The Lies With Truth- , Rhetorically Speaking, Richard Dawkins.net, Scientia Natura: Evolution and Rationality, Scrutiny Hooligans, Sharanya Manivannan, Shrub.com, The Sideshow*, The Silence of Our Friends, Simply Left Behind, Skeptical Brotha, Sly Civilian, SoapBoxBlog, Sour Duck, Streak's Blog, Street Prophets, Stump Lane, Super Babymama, Taking Steps, TBogg*, Temple3, this blog will self-destruct in five seconds, a.k.a. The Pime (disqualified: one name per blog), Thoughts From Kansas, Thoughts of an Average Woman (moved to The Crone Speaks), Tiny Cat Pants, Turn This Bus Around!, Truly Outrageous, uggabugga, Unapologetic Mexican, Unscrewing the Inscrutable, Vortex(t), Welcome to Pottersville, Woman of Color Blog, World O Crap, Wrapped Up Like a Douche (so that's what they were saying), You Forgot Poland! (other best blog name), Zuky

There seems to be some mistake: the category is for "writers who consistently deliver, yet don't receive the recognition they deserve." By contrast, I pride myself on delivering inconsistently, and probably receive precisely the recognition I deserve.

Still, in the spirit of "winning is everything," I'm shooting to get more than three votes this year. So I'm going to throw some some elbows, and here's how: I challenge big-time competitors like Avedon Carol (The Sideshow) to go pick on someone their own size over in the "consonant level" blog nominees. (They're not quite A-list, but B-, C-, D-list... consonants, get it?). Accordingly, I've marked blogs that I think are already widely recognized enough, dammit, with an asterisk. More seriously, I've marked in color the ones I'm familiar with and can already recommend.

Actually, of course, have a look at any of them -- especially "fact-esque" and "The Sideshow," my own nominees for "most deserving" (fact-esque) and "consonant-level" and "best overall" (Sideshow). Heck, if you have a couple of years, have a look at all of them. As ever, may the best blog lose so that I can win.

PS: Nell Lancaster, a frequent commenter here, is among the nominees for "Best Commenter"; don't forget to vote for her whenever that finally rolls around.


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EDIT, 6/11: added plugs for fact-esque and The Sideshow, and link to my nominations post. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:48:00 PM -- |  

 
Jamie Raskin on impeachment
My state senator, Jamie Raskin (MD District 20), visited a forum on impeachment at Montgomery College on April 26; a video of his remarks and discussion with the audience was recently posted by the Takoma Park Impeach Bush and Cheney organization.

After some remarks about an electoral state compact idea he's working for*, Raskin turned to the subject of the forum: impeachment. As a constitutional scholar, he has very good answers to many common objections to impeachment per se:

The Constitution was designed not in such a way that impeachment represented some kind of crisis; people say "you can't do impeachment, because that will cause a constitutional crisis." On the contrary! Impeachment is the tool we use to prevent a constitutional crisis because you've got a President who is drunk on his own power and has run away with the resources of the people.

Raskin also went over the history of impeachment in the U.S.: nine presidents have had articles of impeachment presented against them, with only two (Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton) actually being impeached -- i.e., the process leaving the House and reaching the Senate for trial. Raskin -- having enumerated charges of torture, lawless and warrantless wiretapping, the Iraq war, and criminal negligence in connection with Katrina and its aftermath, commented:

Some people's objections are "how can you say that anything impeachable has been going on?" And there we're just dealing with, you know, parallel universes... Nothing that anybody has ever been impeached for comes remotely close to the things that President Bush and Dick Cheney and this administration have done. Nothing even close.

Raskin made some of his most interesting points in rebutting the notion -- I'm paraphrasing here -- "Why not just wait for the presidential elections? Let's not mess up our chances in '08." Raskin:

It's a dangerous thing for a democracy to allow major transgressions of the constitutional rule of law to take place.

You know, conservatives love this theory of crime called the "broken windows" theory, which James Wilson wrote about. The idea is there are small offenses like graffiti, or somebody breaks a window -- you've got to bring the full force of the law down very quickly because if you leave the graffiti up or the broken windows up, then that leads to people hopping the turnstile, shoplifting, armed robbery, and drug dealing and so on. And you know I think there's something to that, but surely we can apply the "broken windows" theory to the presidency of the United States.

Are we going to allow people to come into office through something very close to a stolen election and then to defy the rule of law every step along the way, and to plunge the nation into aggressive war through a new doctrine of preemption? I don't know. That's a dangerous, dangerous thing just to allow. At very least, the moral case and the political case for impeachment must be made, so people understand it.

Whether or not it's followed through or not, it's very important not to say "well, yeah, Bill Clinton lied under oath about whether or not he had an affair of sorts with an intern; that's impeachable. But the loss of thousands of lives and putting people into secret prisons and presiding over atrocities against civilians in a foreign country, well, you know, that's neither here nor there.

Raskin makes a lot of important points here, I think, but particularly at the end. The sheer scale of what Bush and Cheney have done -- a fraudulent war, trampling human rights, diminishing our rights in this country, brazenly breaking the law, squandering our reputation abroad -- has sometimes led to a kind of perversely fatalistic "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown politics" attitude among many. Are we saying some constitutional betrayals are too big to be impeachable?

The result is that this country is better right now at arresting a kid for eating french fries in the Metro than at saying "no more" to a president hell bent on asserting the "right" to do whatever illegal, immoral thing comes into his head (or to fiddle while a city drowns). It's important -- it's essential -- for the American people to regain the reins of political power and defend our Constitution and our rights from rogue usurpers like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.


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* Nutshell version: states agree to instruct electors to vote for the national popular vote winner. At this point I don't support this idea, but I will look in to it more closely to see if I understand it correctly and if my concerns are misplaced.
EDITS, 6/7: "rebutting the notion" for "answering the question" -- the Raskin quote was made in the course of his prepared remarks, not in answer to an audience question; "Chinatown" allusion spelled out.

UPDATE, 6/7: CROSSPOSTED by "Chip" to AfterDowningStreet.com, with acknowledgement. I'm glad Raskin's remarks will reach a wider audience.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:32:00 AM -- |  

 
Shorter Fred Hiatt Plus (Questions for Obama)
Shorter Fred Hiatt: from outer space, Barack Obama looks just like Mitt Romney. And yet, cries of "wanker" etc. aside, Hiatt does have one point, and he has it right here:

Both want bigger, not smaller, armed forces: Obama calls for an additional 92,000 ground troops, Romney for 100,000.*

What is up with that? It's one of my biggest objections to Obama; we've got about 1.4 million men and women in the United States Armed Forces -- what on earth do we need more for? Especially if (if?) Obama intends to really get us out of Iraq in a timely way? Surely that would go a long way to "freeing up" any troops needed for military missions that actually are in the national interest? Here's Obama writing in the July/August 2007 Foreign Affairs:

To renew American leadership in the world, we must immediately begin working to revitalize our military. A strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace. Unfortunately, the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps, according to our military leaders, are facing a crisis. The Pentagon cannot certify a single army unit within the United States as fully ready to respond in the event of a new crisis or emergency beyond Iraq; 88 percent of the National Guard is not ready to deploy overseas.

We must use this moment both to rebuild our military and to prepare it for the missions of the future. We must retain the capacity to swiftly defeat any conventional threat to our country and our vital interests. But we must also become better prepared to put boots on the ground in order to take on foes that fight asymmetrical and highly adaptive campaigns on a global scale.

We should expand our ground forces by adding 65,000 soldiers to the army and 27,000 marines. Bolstering these forces is about more than meeting quotas. We must recruit the very best and invest in their capacity to succeed. That means providing our servicemen and servicewomen with first-rate equipment, armor, incentives, and training -- including in foreign languages and other critical skills. Each major defense program should be reevaluated in light of current needs, gaps in the field, and likely future threat scenarios. Our military will have to rebuild some capabilities and transform others. At the same time, we need to commit sufficient funding to enable the National Guard to regain a state of readiness.

While I don't disagree with the "rebuilding readiness" parts of this, the "adding on" parts looks more like a conscious sop to placate the right than an actually thoughtful policy. And while I hesitate to challenge "first rate" equipment or "reevaluation" of programs, that often translates to "let's scrap this old, boring stuff and buy lots of new, much cooler stuff." It's possible to read Obama's article to mean "transforming" 92,000 "tail of the spear" desk jobs to 92,000 "head of the spear" boots on the ground, but he isn't clear. On the whole (1) I suspect it's just plain 92,000 more troops and (2) even if it weren't, he's still arguing for armed forces even more capable of overseas interventions, which hardly seems like the brand new direction we need these days.

Like Fred Hiatt or not, he's within his rights to point out that Obama is calling for a U.S. military that is both effectively bigger and better able to do all that asymmetrical stuff that sounds a lot better than, but is often indistinguishable from "counterinsurgency that makes us more enemies than we had before."

In the spirit of fairness and balance that positively suffuses my writings here, I must admit Obama's hardly the first Democrat to make this kind of choice, and I must also admit there are uses for the military that Senator Obama and I seem to be more or less on the same wavelength about: a last resort for stopping genocides, for example, in concert with world alliances.

The trouble is, even if all went well, honorably, and according to the best laid plans of a President Obama, and he did nothing but hold his fire unless really, truly, absolutely necessary... he'd still bequeath a bigger, better set of toys to the next guy. If you squint your eyes just right, recent experience suggests the next guy won't be a militaristic right wing nut about... ulp... 40% of the time -- hardly comforting. I might be persuaded that we shouldn't reduce the size of the US military, if only to take that debate off the table for what will be a crucial presidential election. But I see no good reason to promise expanding it.


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* "Stay-the-Course Plus", Washington Post, June 4. (footnote added 6/5)
posted by Thomas Nephew at 6:45:00 PM -- |